Manel Msalmi

FFN Chief Executive · Founder & President, European Association for the Defense of Minorities

Human rights advocate and interfaith peace activist specializing in the rights of religious and ethnic minorities across the MENA region and Europe.

In the first days after his landslide election victory, Péter Magyar did something that no political calculation fully explains — he put on a kippah, knelt before a wall inscribed with the names of murdered Hungarian Jews, and placed a memorial stone. That image traveled further than any press conference could. For Hungary’s Jewish community — up to 100,000 people, the largest in East-Central Europe — it was, for many, a moment to exhale.

As someone who has spent years working on minority rights and interfaith dialogue across Europe and the MENA region, I have learned to pay close attention to the gestures leaders choose to make before the machinery of governance fully takes over. Péter Magyar, Hungary’s prime minister-elect following the Tisza Party’s historic two-thirds supermajority on April 12, 2026, made his first gestures count.

Holocaust Remembrance Day, Budapest · Péter Magyar, Hungary’s prime minister-elect, wearing a kippah and placing a memorial stone at the Holocaust Memorial Center · Photo: Embassy of Hungary

The ceremony was Hungary’s central state commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day. Israel’s ambassador to Hungary, Maya Kadosh, was present. Magyar knelt near a wall inscribed with the names of the approximately 600,000 Hungarian Jews who were murdered in the Shoah — the largest single-country Jewish deportation in the history of the Holocaust. The image, as one headline put it, made Hungarian Jews breathe a sigh of relief. For now.

📜 The Weight of History

To understand why this moment matters, one must understand what Hungary’s Jewish community has lived through — not only in the 1940s, but in the decades since. Approximately 600,000 Hungarian Jews were deported and murdered, the vast majority in just 56 days in the spring and summer of 1944 — one of the most concentrated acts of mass murder in recorded history. The complicity of the Hungarian state and gendarmerie was extensive and documented.

The 1956 Revolution — the other defining historical event Magyar referenced in his invitation to Netanyahu — offers a different but equally resonant frame. It was a national uprising against Soviet domination, crushed by force, and it remains the foundational myth of modern Hungarian national identity: resistance, sacrifice, and the dream of sovereignty. By linking the October 2026 commemoration of 1956 to an invitation to Israel’s prime minister, Magyar signals something deliberate: that Holocaust memory and national sovereignty are not in competition — they are part of the same story.

🤝 The Diplomatic Outreach — What Happened and Why It Matters

The phone call and the invitation are significant not despite their timing but because of it. Magyar has announced his intention to reverse Orbán’s 2025 withdrawal from the International Criminal Court — the same court that issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in Gaza. The invitation to Budapest thus represents an early and deliberate diplomatic balancing act: maintaining strong bilateral ties with Israel while realigning Hungary with EU norms on international law. The tension is real, and it will need to be managed carefully. But the intent to preserve the relationship is unmistakable.

✍️ What Magyar Has Committed To

🔍 Why This Moment Matters — An Interfaith Perspective

From where I stand — as a Muslim human rights advocate who has spent years working at the intersection of interfaith dialogue, minority protection, and European democratic values — Magyar’s gestures carry significance that reaches beyond bilateral diplomacy.

Across Europe, Jewish communities have experienced a disturbing rise in antisemitic incidents over the past several years: verbal abuse, vandalism of synagogues and cemeteries, online hate speech, and — most gravely — physical violence. In this context, the symbolic weight of a new head of government personally attending a Holocaust memorial ceremony, in a country where the Holocaust was carried out with state complicity, is not a small thing. It is a statement about what kind of nation Hungary intends to be under new leadership.

I have long argued — and I maintain — that the protection of Jewish communities in Europe is inseparable from the broader defense of minority rights. A Europe that allows antisemitism to flourish will not, in the end, protect any minority. The solidarity between Jewish and Muslim communities — both targets of a resurgent far right — is not merely tactical; it is grounded in shared vulnerability and shared values. Magyar’s visible, personal commitment to Holocaust memory sends a signal not only to Hungary’s Jews but to all minorities within Hungary’s borders.

There is also a generational dimension here that deserves attention. The 1956 Revolution — which Magyar has placed at the center of his diplomatic calendar with Netanyahu — is not simply a historical event in Hungary. It is a living memory for many Hungarian families, and a symbol of resistance to authoritarian domination. By marking its 70th anniversary with the presence of the Israeli prime minister, Magyar suggests a conception of Hungarian national identity in which the memory of Jewish suffering and the memory of national resistance are held together, not placed in competition.

That is a meaningful and difficult thing to achieve. It will require sustained political will, careful institutional work, and — above all — the willingness to confront Hungary’s own historical complicity in the Holocaust without deflection or minimization. The gestures of this first week are encouraging. The real test, as always, lies ahead.

Faith & Freedom News will continue to monitor the formation of Hungary’s new government, the upcoming foreign ministers’ meeting, and the October 2026 ceremony as the key markers of whether these commitments become policy — or remain, however well-intentioned, only gestures.

Manel Msalmi is the Chief Executive of Faith & Freedom News and Founder & President of the European Association for the Defense of Minorities — a human rights advocate and interfaith peace activist specializing in the rights of religious and ethnic minorities across the MENA region and Europe.